Microsoft's dog food dietitian

C|Net | at | by Mike

Microsoft's technology dietitians offer employees only one item on the menu: dog food. That's because the software maker has a philosophy known internally as "eating our own dog food," referring to the common practice of running beta, or test, software throughout the organization.

The whole dog food concept has never been more important to Microsoft or potentially difficult. The Redmond, Wash.-based company now has more enterprise software testing at one time than perhaps any other time in its history. Testing products include: Exchange Server 2003, Office 2003 and Real-Time Communications Server, SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Windows Messenger 5, among others.